


From Eden With Love

by mumblesinks



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Asexual Relationship, Asexuality, Character Study, Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sort Of, The Bible - Freeform, excessive usage of narrative parallels, love is a tricky concept, not entirely canon compliant, this is so fucking blasphemous oh no, this is some next-level projection shit yall don't even know, unacceptable interpretations of Scripture, unhealthy attitudes about sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 15:29:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19771141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblesinks/pseuds/mumblesinks
Summary: In the beginning, there was Love.Crawly remembered it, sometimes.





	From Eden With Love

**Author's Note:**

> everyone raise your hands if you've felt personally victimized by christianity
> 
> edit: i would like to acknowledge that there’s a lot of things i ignored about both the bible and the source material, this is essentially me processing things that bother me about the bible fandom through the lens of things i like about the good omens fandom

In the beginning, there was Love.

Crawly remembered it, sometimes.

He saw Love reflected in the night sky before the dawn of that day in the Garden, burning in those unfathomable pinpricks of light above him. Even the infinite darkness was dusted with God’s adoration, and for a moment he could imagine She’d not quite forgotten him.

He saw Love pulsing warm and powerful between the Man and the Woman. And not just the all-encompassing Love that comprised the essence of the Host but a smaller, deeper love that grew and evolved as they did. Even as he slithered into the depths of the Garden he hungered for it, almost as eager to possess as to destroy. He would learn an awful lot about temptation that day, and the echoes of it would reverberate through all of Creation, cracking the foundations of empires countless centuries later. But he was not yet a tempter. Back then, he only ever asked questions.

He saw Love in the Woman’s ceaseless yearning to know the world around her. No other human would ever possess a mind so utterly breathtaking as Eve’s. She was the jewel of creation, bright and lovely and curious and like nothing Crawly had ever seen. He found her just at dawn, sitting in the grass at the foot of the tree, and when he asked her why its fruit was forbidden her laugh glittered like the stars he’d helped create. It was forbidden because it was forbidden, she said, and Crawly asked her how that made any sense at all.

Her beautiful smile faltered. A clever serpent, she called him, the cleverest beast she’d ever met. Don’t waste your breath on me, she said, and that was when he saw the fruit already in her hand, tears already in her eyes.

It wasn’t the last time he’d claim credit for evil he hadn’t done, but it was the last time he ever spoke to Eve.

On the Garden wall, he met an angel, and together they watched her leave Eden. He watched Adam follow her.

* * *

Love had been corrupted along with the rest of creation. Outside the walls of Eden, everything fractured. There were angels, there were humans, there were demons. There was love, there was lust, there was sex.

Demons did not have sex. A hollow mockery of the thing was the closest they could get, and they craved it in the same sense that they craved any other perversion.

At first, Crawly didn’t know what it was. It seemed to come naturally to the other demons. Fixate, nurture loathing, overpower, fuck. He didn’t understand the rutting and writhing and screaming any more than he understood any other kind of combat, but he quickly learned what winning looked like. Generally, Crawly’s talents lay in strategic losing.

Back on Earth, he realized that to some the act was an expression of desire, at times pure and good but so, so easily corrupted. Hell thrived in those days. Demons danced and mingled with humanity. Amidst it all Crawly remembered Love, and he remembered love, and he remembered Eve.

He thought of her often. She had taught him the difference between good and evil, although he didn’t understand it yet.

* * *

There was going to be a flood, Aziraphale told him. Only one righteous man remained, and he and his family were to be the only survivors. Sin had taken root, he said. All the holy water in the world couldn’t cleanse it, but all the holy water in the world was going to try anyway, so maybe Crawly had better go Down and lay low for a while.

They all had to die, everyone but Noah and his family. Everyone, even the kids.

Crawly knew he should take some sort of dark satisfaction in the triumph of a world corrupted. They’d won, hadn’t they? The Fallen had corrupted Her creation so that it couldn’t be saved, only razed and begun anew. He knew he was supposed to first revel, then scream with the agony of Her retribution as the first drops of Holy rain fell. It would’ve been a well-deserved end, to be cleansed out of existence.

But then this angel had to go and warn him.

Crawly cringed as his innate demonic glee flickered and failed. To feel victory and then to die would’ve been correct, in the larger, nuanced way Aziraphale seemed unwilling to comprehend. But he couldn’t now, not if the kids were going to die, too. He pushed a useless breath into his lungs, back out again. The air was already thick with the brewing Holy storm and it settled in his chest like poison, aching in the absence of Grace.

_Get up there and cause some trouble_

It was only a matter of time before Aziraphale found him in the bowels of the Ark, wings mantled over the huddle of children he’d snuck on board.

They fought, of course. An angel could not simply let the wiles of a demon go un-thwarted, especially wiles in direct opposition to God’s ineffable Justice. It would be several thousand years before it occurred to Crowley that perhaps he, trapped and burdened and burned by the very air around him, should not have discorporated the angel so easily.

* * *

Crawly saw fewer and fewer echoes of Love as time surged onwards. It was impossible to say if it was fading or if he was simply forgetting, and both potentialities terrified him.

He saw Aziraphale again at Sodom, only briefly. He wanted to talk to the angel, to try to remember. Instead, he watched in horror as Lot offered his daughters to the mob and was vindicated for it as if it wasn’t the most despicable thing a father could do. Crawly shuddered. At least in Hell when these things happened no one tried to pretend anything about it was good.

Later, the pillar of salt keeping vigil over the city’s destruction seemed to mock him as he sat at its base. Eve might’ve liked Lot’s wife, he thought. At least, she would’ve sympathized.

* * *

Egypt was slowly burning, crumbling under the merciless wrath of God.

Some spoiled upstart prince had run off in a fit and come back wielding ‘magic’ the likes of which the Pharaoh’s priests had never seen. God wanted Israel freed, heedless of the infrastructural chaos this would cause, and was willing to torture the Egyptians into submission if necessary.

Crawly knew the Israelites were suffering. The cruelties they had endured more than justified God’s wrath, he knew this. But justice without Love was no redemption. Not for the first time, Crawly found himself screaming himself hoarse at the sky. Not one was spared the horrors God rained down upon them.

Not even the kids.

Crawly had never heard wailing so heartbroken and hopeless outside of Hell itself.

He found Ramses in the royal chamber. The man was listless, blank, shattered under the weight of grief and loss. He took one look at Crawly’s timeless visage untouched by plague and misery and let out a broken cry, launching himself at the demon with animalistic rage. Crawly sidestepped easily, watching him through slit serpent eyes. To fight was ineffectual, in the grand scheme of things, but to lose might buy certain fleeing nations time.

He remembered watching from afar as Eve screamed over the broken body of Abel, all the peace he’d wished he could offer then, all the love he still remembered how to imitate. He remembered how all her love changed nothing. He wished he could throw himself at the feet of a god who would listen, even for a moment. It was a selfish, human thing.

And, just this once, it wasn’t quite so unattainable.

He stilled Pharaoh with a touch of his hand. The King of Egypt collapsed into his arms, a deep, wrenching cry ripping its way out as tears finally came and Crawly quieted this, too. Dark wings swept around them like curtains as he drew their lips together and wove the softest temptation he knew.

Later accounts would note that Pharaoh went back on his word and pursued the newly freed nation of Israel, most claiming it was God who hardened his heart. Crawly—Crowley, by the time he heard this baffling version of events—almost found it funny how so many generations of scribes and preachers could all ask the wrong question. The mystery had never been how the grief-stricken agony of a father who lost his son could turn to anger, but what stayed his hand until Israel had traveled all the way to the edge of the red sea.

* * *

Aziraphale was the very best of Heaven. Crowley believed he was the only worthwhile bastard Up There. He’d thought it since the day he met him, but his opinion of Aziraphale grew into something Else during certain moments in the days before the Arrangement, moments neither of them ever acknowledged even after.

The death of the carpenter from Nazareth marked the beginning of something no one on either side entirely understood. For three days all the world was holy ground, and for three days Crowley stubbornly refused to return to Hell, because this was the first time in millennia that he’d felt the presence of the Love he’d been trying to remember since the beginning. Even if it hurt.

Aziraphale found him sitting in the shade outside a vacant Roman home, grinding the base of his skull into the stone and gasping with pain. The angel went still at the sight of him, and for a moment Crowley feared he would discorporate him on sight. Instead Aziraphale knelt beside him, checking him over for injury. When he found none, he seemed to realize why Crowley was in pain, and those otherworldly sapphire eyes of his went wide with a sort of sympathetic dismay. Then, for reasons Crowley couldn’t fathom, he sat down beside him, muttering about how this was the least effable part of the Plan so far, if you ask him.

And then he stayed.

Even when the sun dipped down to the horizon, even when the city’s bustling streets went cold and dark, he stayed.

At some point during the night, Crowley began to lean on him, and then when even that became too exhausting he let his head fall into the angel’s lap. Aziraphale was kind enough not to remark on it, instead running uncertain, callused fingers through his curls and responding to his choked sobs as if they were having a conversation about the paths of the stars. The three lined-up ones were especially lined up tonight, he noted, Crowley should consider taking a gander when he felt up to it. Crowley almost managed to laugh at that.

If he thought about it too much, he always found himself desperately missing the stars. The fall of humanity had drawn a murky curtain over the night sky so that only angels could see it in all its glory anymore, and with every passing year the lights of civilization grew brighter and dimmed the sky. It was almost enough to make Crowley miss Heaven.

He whimpered and twisted white-knuckled fists in Aziraphale’s robe, trying not to lose himself in longing. Distantly, he heard Aziraphale apologize—for what, Crowley didn’t know—and somehow the whisper of fingers through his hair was all it took to bring him back.

He knew Aziraphale couldn’t understand why he was doing this to himself. There was no way for a being made of Love to know how it felt to forget, how much it hurt to remember, how much he _needed_ to remember. But the angel stayed anyway, and for all the fleeting glimpses of love Crowley had chased throughout the years, this image lingered longest.

They never directly mentioned it again, though the next time they saw each other in Rome Aziraphale seemed confused that Crowley was still a demon, as if those days in Golgotha should have changed something. As much as Crowley wanted to be pissed at him for that, he mostly didn’t want to admit part of him felt the same way, or the real reason he started hiding his serpentine eyes.

* * *

It was centuries before Crowley dared to use the word ‘love’ to describe his feelings toward Aziraphale, and only because in that time it had grown into a thing far beyond the scope of the word itself.

The worst part was that it was reciprocated.

Of course Aziraphale loved him back. Aziraphale loved everyone.

It was blatant torture, sometimes, and Crowley couldn’t honestly tell if it was on purpose. Aziraphale would spend years insisting they were nothing more than allies of convenience, then go flitting off to revolutionary France dressed like an aristocrat just to draw Crowley out for a lunch date. It frayed his nerves, put him on edge, sometimes it just hurt, but Crowley’d be damned all over again before he’d turn the angel down.

He could never bring himself to say no, to resist indulging Aziraphale the childish requests for little favors and food and rescues from certain death. But every time he did Aziraphale would _look_ at Crowley, get this beautiful little smile on his face like he knew something Crowley didn’t, and tell him how kind he was. At first Crowley responded with rote disagreement, no he wasn’t kind, demons aren’t kind, not part of the territory and whatnot. Eventually the denials became more fervent, more pained, because Aziraphale kept missing the fucking _point._

 _I’m not nice, angel, I’m not nice to everyone, I’m only nice to_ you.

Once or twice Crowley attempted to offer him sex. It wasn’t so much seduction as it was a bewildered attempt at admitting defeat, begging for mercy, part of an exhaustive search for what exactly it was this angel _wanted_ from him. He was forced to let the matter go because of the reaction he got when he drunkenly let slip that he didn’t actually like sex. He never had, he explained, it was just rather difficult to avoid in Hell. But come to think of it, which he just had, the fact that he rarely got to choose his partner might be the problem, and all things considered he might not mind if Aziraphale wanted to give it a go.

Aziraphale looked positively horrified, sobering up and excusing himself without another word.

For a while after that little fiasco Aziraphale dropped the pretenses a bit. For almost twenty years he didn’t bother to insist they were enemies or try to maintain the thin film of deniability he usually painted over their interactions. Crowley got the uncomfortable sense that Aziraphale had quite forgotten he was a demon. Demons did all manner of horrid things to each other, it was what they _were,_ no point getting all melancholy and weird about it now.

Eventually Aziraphale lapsed back into his old ways, proper and pious and infuriatingly legalistic about their whole Arrangement, at least on the surface. The coy smiles and enthusiasm for lunch dates and persistent, unorthodox companionship never faltered for a moment.

Crowley could not for the eternal life of him figure out why the blasted angel wouldn’t let him _go._

* * *

Nanny Ashtoreth seemed to be the only member of the entire Dowling household capable of quieting young Warlock when he got to crying, though Crowley figured this wasn’t all that odd. Warlock was a child of Hell, after all, and Crowley was the only thing around evil enough to make the poor dear feel at home.

He would often wander through the estate garden with the kid in his arms, grateful for the chance to drop his disguise and simply be. Sometimes Aziraphale would be there too, making an absolute mess of the plants and feeding flowerbed pests like he was trying to kill off all the vegetation on the whole property. It was a wonder anyone at all bought him as a gardener, Crowley would mutter, but Aziraphale would respond by gushing at how wonderful a nanny Crowley was and he decided it was altogether not worth bringing it up anymore.

Aziraphale was there that day, and he lit up at the sight of Crowley like he was just seeing him for the first time in decades. He’d been terribly bored all day, he told him, and just _look_ at the state of the petunias he’d been trying to grow. Crowley debated for a few horribly conflicted moments whether to tell him that those were poppies and they were also doing just fine, but Aziraphale just changed the subject, flashing a self-satisfied smirk. Crowley narrowed his eyes. The angel really could be a bit of a bastard sometimes.

They wandered lazily through sun-dappled shade, going off on rambling tangents about nothing in particular. Every so often Warlock would make a weird gurgling noise, to which Crowley would respond as if he were contributing something insightful to the conversation. He didn’t miss how Aziraphale would look at him when he did that. He didn’t miss it, but bless it all, the world was ending.

All at once the thought of it slammed into Crowley and he clenched his jaw against it, pulling Warlock tighter to his chest. This was it, wasn’t it? Ten odd years left, and then no more Earth, no more Aziraphale. Just Hell, forever.

“Do you ever regret what you did to Eve?”

Crowley started, relaxing his hold on the baby. “What?”

Aziraphale was staring at the sky in that way he was wont to do whenever he was reminiscing. “Eve. Lovely woman. The first woman, the only one there was for a bit.”

Crowley couldn’t at all see where this was going. “Wha- obviously I _remember_ Eve, she’s not the sort of person you forget. I just don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“I’m asking if you regret it. The whole business with the fruit of knowledge and the curse.”

“’Course not. I was just following orders.”

Aziraphale smiled sadly. “No, you weren’t.”

“What exactly are you implying, angel?”

“I’m simply _asking,_ my dear, if you regret volunteering yourself to take on part of the curse.”

Crowley went still.

Aziraphale continued. “I just figured, it’s all supposed to be ending soon, surely you have an opinion one way or another about whether it was worth it.”

“How long…?”

“Have I known?” Aziraphale at least had the grace to look sheepish. “I was tasked with protecting the Garden, dear, I’d be remiss not to have kept an eye on the demon who snuck in dressed as a snake, no matter how harmless he seemed.”

Crowley thought back to the Wall, the fear he felt watching Eve go out from the Garden, the small comfort it was to see Adam wielding that blessed flaming sword in her defense. Back then his answer to Aziraphale’s question had been the same as it was now. It just wasn’t an answer he’d imagined he’d ever have to give.

“Eh, crawl on my belly and eat dust, I’ve done worse things for fun,” he mumbled lamely.

He found himself quite unable to meet Aziraphale’s eyes. No wonder the bloody angel kept insisting he was kind, no wonder he kept missing the point. No wonder he kept _looking_ at him like that. All this time, ever since Eden, Aziraphale had _known._

“You’re…oh, Crowley, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“No, no. It’s…this explains some things.”

“Does it?”

Warlock gurgled.

Crowley snorted quietly. “Is that so, Warlock?”

“You know, Crowley,” Aziraphale began, hesitating a bit before he seemed to find the words to speak again. “I really do think you did the right thing.”

Crowley smiled, mostly to himself. “I know.”

Crowley could feel Aziraphale staring again, but he ignored it, letting Warlock’s little hand wrap around his finger as the baby made several more valiant attempts to speak a language he hadn’t yet learned.

Crowley thought he was doing just fine.


End file.
